High, wide and handsome: The John Lombardi years

Yes, the photo above is an SX-70, which all by itself captures an era, doesn’t it? In the slightly fuzzy, slightly off-color of the Polaroid tech of the time, we see, L-R, Bob Ward, John Lombardi, and me. The photograph — our youth, our self-satisfied attitudes, the idea that our lives were all ahead of us, and we were in complete charge of our destinies — it’s all right there, capturing an entire decade that began in the early 70’s and ended sometime in the 80’s. We were all in what we called the journalism game, Ward and I as writers, Lombardi as our frequent editor at New Times magazine and elsewhere. Ward and I were eager runners through the halls of perpetual youth, as if it would always be just like this, the three of us kings of the world. Lombardi, from his perch in the editor’s chair, presided over our hijinks and editorial output at magazines like Esquire, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, New Times, Oui, and the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He edited us, and he edited a boy’s club generation of writers that included Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Sam Anson, Paul Slanksy, Jesse Kornbluth, Arthur Lubow, Geoffrey Wolff, Ron Rosenbaum, Robert Ward and yours truly.

It was quite a ride, and for John Lombardi it has ended. The news reached Bob Ward and myself this week that Lombardi, as he was known to one and all, passed away two years ago at his home in Camden, New Jersey. He was 81. I’m here to tell you some of the stories of that storied era in New York and in journalism, but first, this confession. Bob Ward and Lombardi and I were inseparable for years, but neither of us had heard from or about Lombardi in decades. It’s a sad truth of some friendships, of course. They come to an end, often by the decision of one of the friends and without the knowledge of the others. That is what happened for both Bob and me with Lombardi.

He dropped off the face of the earth for both of us decades ago. No letters, no phone calls, just emptiness. He had no social media presence when that phenomenon came around, and no one who moved in our circles had heard from him in several decades, not by mail, not by phone — nothing. An obituary Ward somehow came across in the Gloucester City News in Southern New Jersey, said that he had taught at Haverford College east of Philadelphia in recent years, but that was news to both of us. Over the years, I heard that he had edited an alternative paper in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, or somewhere near there, and years ago I heard from a friend that he was editing another alternative paper in Salt Lake City, Utah, of all places. Another friend told me Lombardi had become a kind of journeyman editor as the 90’s turned into the early 2000’s, getting hired here and there because of his connection to the New Journalism and alternative publications like Rolling Stone and New Times.

Back in the day, he was anything but a journeyman. He had romantic relationships with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who was then editor of the London version of Playboy; with Blondie singer Debbie Harry, who had some sort of “understanding” with her companion and bandmate Chris Stein that allowed occasional relationships on the side; with SNL star Gilda Radner before she married guitarist G.E. Smith; with British actress Fiona Lewis, who got her start in horror films and had a wit like a razor and was almost inhumanly beautiful.

But Lombardi’s relationship that lasted was with magazines. He had a personality and temperament that ran in cycles — from the buzz of coming up with ideas and making assignments to the breathless thrill of publication. When magazines hit the stands in those days, everybody talked about hot stories. As a writer, to have your name on the cover of one of the magazines of the moment was a high that although plenty of attempts were made, no drug could ever match. The same was true for editors, albeit in a different context. The talk they sought was among their fellow professionals. That was the way that editors’ careers were made. Lombardi started moving up the magazine ranks after he assigned and edited Hunter Thompson’s first Rolling Stone piece, “Freak Power in the Rockies,” about Hunter’s run for Mayor of Aspen, Colorado. The story got around that Thompson showed up in the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco carrying a six pack of beer and a leather satchel from which he pulled a marine air horn and started blasting into people’s offices. Wenner walked up to Lombardi shaking his head and said, “You’re a hippie. You handle him.”

Lombardi wasn’t a hippie, and neither was Thompson, and Lombardi came up with the genius idea of wrangling Hunter’s notes from him and lashing them into the shape of an article by allowing the odd logic of Thompson’s mind to dictate the article’s shape, shorn of any normal journalistic rules. He would take Hunter’s notebook pages and lay them out and move them around until something made sense and then type them up and run them. Lombardi moved on, but the manner by which Thompson was edited at Rolling Stone continued after he was gone.

I met Lombardi on the phone from Chicago where he was an editor at Oui magazine, a kind of junior varsity title in the Playboy empire pitched at the “youthquake” that was then appealing to advertisers and television programmers and Hollywood studios. The idea seemed to be “Easy Rider” between magazine covers…or something like that anyway, and Lombardi was tasked with finding “youth” writers to write for this imaginary audience.

He called me at the Voice offices one day and asked if I would be interested in covering the Daytona 24 Hour sports car race in Florida that was happening that weekend. Hours later, I was in First Class on a flight to Daytona — everyone went First Class working for Playboy back then. When I got to the track, they were running practice laps and qualifying before race day. I found a pay phone in the pits and called Lombardi in Chicago and when he came on the line, I held out the phone as close as I could get it to the edge of the track as a Matra-Simca prototype flew by, its 12 cylinder engine screaming in a pitch that does not occur in nature, followed by the 12 cylinders of a Ferrari Daytona fastback, equally teeth-grindingly loud and nerve-shattering. “What the fuck is that?” Lombardi yelled into the phone after the two cars had disappeared down the straightaway. I described the cars as sex on four wheels. I wrote the story, and we were off and running.

Lombardi had what I once described to someone else as a “nose for the present tense.” Good editors can see around corners and over hills and detect trends before they arrive. The idea of magazines back then was to tell people stuff they should know but didn’t. Lombardi had an editor’s natural-born alchemy of enthusiasm and vision. He knew his job was to imbue in writers his excitement about a subject that they wouldn’t share until they began reporting the story. He had a sixth sense of what was there, but you had to find it. When he assigned me to write a piece about Gary Kellgren, the recording genius who owned the Record Plant in L.A. where Stevie Wonder and the Eagles and Sly and the Family Stone and every other hot act of the moment recorded, I had no idea who Kellgren was or why I should be writing about him. The article turned out to be a living obituary for a man who was dying in front of my eyes, and as if some rock and roll god had reached down and touched me and Lombardi and New Times magazine all at once, Kellgren died the day the magazine hit the stands and became legendary because of that coincidence no one could have predicted, although the way Lombardi talked about the subject, he came close.

Another time, Lombardi assigned me to write a piece about how Rupert Murdoch took over the New York Magazine empire from editor and publisher Clay Felker. The takeover was the talk of the town, but nobody had the details. Lombardi called me from L.A. where he was working for one of Larry Flynt’s T&A magazines and said he had gotten the job of Executive Editor at New Times and his first day at work would be a week from that day, the following Monday. He wanted me to report and write the story in seven days so he could make a grand entrance at his new job and asked me if I could do it in that short amount of time. I told him yes, of course, and I did. The piece had to be in by the next Monday, so I set to work and by Saturday was ready to start writing. Lombardi practically moved into my loft on Sunday after I had about half the piece done. As I wrote in my office in the back, I would walk each page up to Lombardi, who was sitting at the dining room table at the front of the loft with a Gauloises cigarette in one hand and a pencil in the other. I remember once handing him a page as he finished editing the last one I had delivered. I looked down at the page on the table. There were black cross-outs all over the page, with a big “X” across the entire last paragraph. He took a puff of his Gauloises and through a cloud of its weird-smelling smoke said, “You didn’t end up with much on that one. Keep writing.”

He chopped and cut and moved whole sections of the thing around and had me write an entirely new lede on the piece, and turned the story into one of the best things I had ever written. Here’s the lede he pulled out of me with an expert set of editorial pliers:

“Last Summer, Clay Felker was the Concorde of the New Journalism — everybody wanted a seat. When he walked into Chasen’s in L.A., tables literally turned. At Elaine’s, while he wolfed his fettucini, writers tapped at him like woodpeckers. For almost ten years, Felker looked like a genius: a brilliant editor, a powerful publisher, a successful businessman in the tough world of big-time magazine publishing. Felker floated his image the way a city in debt floats a bond issue — with hustle, hype, and other people’s money. He created a dream, the Clay Felker dream, of instant success, stardom, the pleasures of the temporary life. The pages of New York, New West, and The Village Voice carried a subtle message: if you want people to believe you’re successful, wealthy, sophisticated, act that way. You, too, can be Robert Evans.”

Half that paragraph came right out of Lombardi’s mouth. We talked it through with him standing over my shoulder at the typewriter as I copied down a phrase, tuned a metaphor, matched a rhythm. It was the greatest gift an editor can give — to make a writer sound like a genius. With John Lombardi in the editor’s chair, you, too, could be Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe.

There will never be another like you, Lombardi. Farewell, old friend. You didn’t die alone. All those ideas you gave away, all those overbearing paragraphs you excised, all those pieces you took as lead and turned into gold…they live on in your memory.